This is what I don’t like about astronomy: what you see through the telescope is nothing like the photographs. Tonight, there will be no violent ’80s-dream- dance-club nebulas. What we will see instead: something gray and fuzzy. A blip through a lens.
And so we find ourselves in line at the urban astronomy center, waiting for our turn to see Venus tracked across the night sky.
It is dark and warm and the air is heavy with rain and there are fireflies in the field across the lawn and the attendant says, “Have you read about Mars’s moon? Phobos is going to shatter.” He says, “Structural failure. Pulled apart. Barely holding together.”
Here is something true: My father tells me that when I was an infant, and colicky, he could calm me down right away by just taking me outside. I’d quiet down and look at the sky.
Here is something that is not true: I remember looking at the sky as a child.
Here is something true: Phobos is the son of Venus and Mars. He is the product of infidelity.
Phobos was portrayed as a force, a thing, personification. Often, we find him shown on a hero’s shield, a physical prayer for success in battle, meant to instill terror into the hearts of enemies. With his lion’s head, he stared, “backwards with eyes that glowed with fire. His mouth was full of teeth in a white row, fearful and daunting. . . .”
But there are not many depictions of Phobos. This one above, the first perhaps, is authored by Hesiod, who so carefully thought to give us origins and reasons. However, there’s one thing he didn’t explain: What was Phobos looking back for?
Reasons for looking back:
- To understand how one arrives where (s)he is currently
- To see what follows
A friend asks me why you and I are together, and I don’t tell her I’ve also often wondered the same thing. Instead I tell her we’re dating because you’re ridiculous. It balances out my seriousness. I tell her—while looking out across the street to the old courthouse lawn where children play, squealing and tripping—that there’s something attractive about the way you don’t give a fuck. I say, I wish I could not give a fuck.
But your absurdism is also a barrier; I know that as much as I value your antics they also keep me at arms’ length. This is an intentional knowing.
You dress as Hitler for Halloween, and genocide isn’t funny. You have no filter—you will say anything at any time and don’t think about the ramifications; my life is defined by words: their individual and collective meanings. You sold drugs for a living before SWAT burst into your house and handcuffed you. You mocked these same officers by playing Rachmaninov with your hands stuck fast together. I had a drug problem before we ever met, and it shadows years of my life: the shame and irresponsible rituals.
You know where our first date was, I ask my friend. To the opera. He took me to see Cosi Fan Tutte. Do you know how hard it is to find a guy who likes opera?
Are you doing okay, she asks.
Fine, I say. Everything’s fine.
At home I read that Phobos—one of Mars’s moons—is in a demise. It will take fifty million years for ruination to be complete. Mars’s gravity is stretching Phobos beyond its limits.
Attraction always destroys something.
Not like the moon was going to survive anyway, though—“The interior of Phobos is nothing but a pile of rubble that’s barely holding together.” Regardless, I can’t imagine falling apart for so long.
We are waiting to see Venus, but you want to see Mars. I tell you we’d have to wait until almost morning, but we never stay up together anymore. When we put our faces against the plastic eyepiece we see Venus as a shaky, colorless circle.
I imagine Venus is aware that people are looking at her. This terrifies her. Up close: she knows her pockmarks and imperfections are so large a landscape she cannot hide it. She knows a surface is important, because that is what people see. She also knows we rarely see ourselves the way others see us, but knowing this doesn’t actually change anything. She does not like feeling discovered or exposed, even if that imperfect surface holds, even if the viewer doesn’t see the troubled core.
I’ve been taught that myths explain the thoughts of the ancients—they are, in a sense, origin stories to help us (them?) understand the world. But if this is true, I’m having trouble understanding the lesson learned by the infidelity of Venus and Mars. You see, the astronomers have mixed their classics, Greek and Roman—careless, thoughtless—and so now everything is confused. How can we understand how we arrived where we are if the starting point is so convoluted?
Origin stories:
1. When Cronus overthrew his father, the primordial god Uranus, Uranus was castrated, his genitals thrown into the sea. The blood mixed with sea-foam, and out of it Venus was born.
2. I remember what came before—the opera, going to the bar with friends, the late-night movies. I remember the process of becoming a couple. We slid into it without solidifying anything with words. We slid into bed enough times that it made sense to just call ourselves something, eventually.
I was the one who said I wanted an open relationship. You were younger than I, and brash, and full of desire for things I’d already gotten tired of, and so I said, it’s okay to sleep with other people. Honestly, the provision wasn’t for me. I never meant for it to be. I imagined that even if I wanted to, I would be too busy with work, and thinking, and thinking.
How did they arrive here? Look back:
Venus was married to Vulcan, but she had an affair with Mars. When Vulcan discovered the betrayal, he ensnared the lovers, caught mid-act, with a mesh net. In it they were displayed to the other gods of Olympus.
Why did she have an affair?
Possible reasons for cheating:
- Venus, goddess of love and beauty, but also of desire, simply could not contain herself.
- Venus did not love Vulcan, and perhaps she never did.
One of the problems with the conflation of Aphrodite and Venus is that they really were (are?) significantly different. Aphrodite, it seems, was a goddess of feeling—of pleasure, of aesthetics. Though both are tied to reproduction, Aphrodite is linked to procreation, while Venus is associated with fertility. Though these two concepts are tied as well, procreation is a shared act, while fertility feels as if it only belongs to the self.
I wonder, if when Venus was in bed with Mars, she thought of her other self, the one that came before, her Greek incarnation. I wonder if she knew she’d been molded from a younger version and only became something else because of elapsing time. I wonder if she had memories of what this younger self wanted—and did—and if these memories, Aphrodite’s memories, made her long for the way things used to be, when sex was about two people instead of the self.
Three days later I am in the backyard. I have stayed up all night having sex with a man who is not you. But I am alone now, coffee warming my hands in the chilly pre-dawn. Mars is small and barely bright in the sky.
Right now you are gone and visiting friends in another state. You are coming home in a few days. You do not know what I have done with this other man—we will never be caught—and I will not tell you. Regardless, it will be the end of us.
Perhaps this is why Mars flees Venus: embarrassment a wicked memory.
This is not what happened: I said I was in love with you.
This is what happened: lying together in the hammock that night I said I loved you, but that I was never in love with you.
You said, I’m okay with that.
This week I have read two articles about decay and space. Phobos will not be a moon forever. But Mars is barely holding on too. I read that his air is being stripped by solar winds—that this has been occurring for as long as he has existed. Eventually he will have no atmosphere, no protection. He will be laid bare again.
My horoscope, the day before you come home: Frankly, I have no advice. You might have bathed babies, painted holiday eggs, but instead you leap naked but never touch.
I have not bathed a baby. I terminated it instead.
Why do we have affairs?
Possible Answer:
1. Because of children
a. Mars had no father.
This is how I feel about our child that was never born— you were there but you were not there, not really a father at all. Stripped on an exam room table I worried about my imperfections: that patch of small hairs that didn’t get shaved, razor burn bumps, stretch marks. And at home afterward—I did not want you close. I wanted to escape you.
Tonight Mars is climbing upwards, to escape Venus. I read that I have missed the time of conjunction—Mars and Venus have already had their brief affair.
This is another thing mythology doesn’t tell me: why the affair ended, or if it ever did.
This is a thing that never happened: you said, it will be okay.
This is what did happen: you said, fuck.
I tell the other man we can’t continue doing this.
I tell him: I don’t love you either. There is no room to love anyone because the baby I haven’t bathed takes everything from me.
He says: I have no advice.
This is what happened: You, young and not understanding because I hadn’t told you how I felt, made jokes about abortion. You sighed relief when I explained blighted ovum. I mourned for a child who would never have the chance to be married, to be shackled by life, and because I resented you for your relief, I slept with someone else.
I broke up with you when you came back. You had a cut on your forehead from where you fell snowboarding. You were happy to see me, reaching for me. You were not a God, as much as you wanted to be. You were a blip through a lens, shaking and stripped. It is cruel, but this is how I saw you when you came home, sat on my bed, and I said, we’re done.
You said I looked okay. You quoted me even, pleading: “Remember, you said, I’m alright.”
A reason for looking back:
1. To discern if we really made a mistake, or if there was no choice.
A reason for looking back:
1. To keep from moving forward
A reason for looking back:
1. To touch, even if briefly, what we’ve left behind.
My fortune: I leap naked but never touch.
Gwendolyn Paradice is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, identifies as two- spirited, and is hard of hearing. Gwen’s first collection of short stories, More Enduring for Having Been Broken, Black Lawrence Press’s 2019 Hudson winner, will be published in January 2021. The chapbook she authored with poet Kara Dorris, Carnival Bound (or, Please Unwrap Me), is one of The Cupboard Pamphlet’s 2019 editors’ choices and is forthcoming late 2020. Her Best American and Pushcart nominated fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Tin House, Uncanny, Booth, Anomaly, Crab Orchard Review, and others. She is a Graduate Teaching Instructor and Ridgel Fellow PhD candidate in English/Creative Writing at the University of Missouri – Columbia.
